Gajendra's suicide at AAP rally: 'Peepli Live' doesn't end

Gajendra Singh, a middling farmer from Dausa participated in a rally to protest against the government's proposed Land Acquisition Bill. For reasons known best to him he climbed a tree and was on it for more than an hour raising slogans, cracking jokes, generally creating a spectacle.  Suddenly it was noticed that he was hanging by the cloth noose he had created for himself. And from there on began what many people have referred to as "Peepli Live 2" or the Peepli Live moment. The politicians immediately took combat positions and started hurling accusations at each other. The largest police force in the world, the Delhi Police blamed the rally organisers and the general public. The home minister tried to shield the Delhi Police by referring to an FIR, which the Delhi Police had filed against everyone else present at Jantar Mantar. The "Iron Man" himself, on his sixth visit to India, found time to reach out to the family in the village through Twitter. And if this wasn’t enough, television discovered the difference between the handwriting of Gajendra Singh in his diaries (those that he kept with his sister) and the handwriting on the alleged suicide note. Safa tying skills were discovered long before.

Before the Nepal earthquake tilted our moral compasses northwards, Gajendra Singh was the figure around whom a lot of emotion was begin utilised. In a situation where only two per cent of news is about rural india and most editors find it too unsexy, the rural presents itself in our lives only when an incident such as the one at Jantar Mantar happens. The focus of the news however never wavers from being individualistic. As Rafeef Ziadah writes, “… And just give us a story, a human story. You see, this is not political.” – We teach life, Sir.

The original title of Peepli Live was “The Falling”. In fact right up till the release of the film, we were the “Falling” cast and crew. The reason for the change of name was benign and practical. The marketing team felt, and rightly so, that a title in English especially one, which is not self-explanatory, would affect the way people will approach the film. And so “The Falling” became Peepli Live.

Peepli Live for me has never managed to capture the full intensity of “The Falling”. As opposed to the former, the latter was more an image, a process of dwindling, sinking – a reduction which could only be captured in continuous tense. And this sense of the film is conveyed not so much through Natha the apparent protagonist of the film but by Hori Mahato the impoverished farmer who digs up earth from his barren piece of land to sell at the nearby brick kiln to make a living.

Among the many charges of plagiarism that the film has been subjected to, the charges regarding Premchand’s Godaan are not just true, but Hori Mahato has been lifted in broad daylight and with pride. Hori travels from 1936 into 2000s with P Sainath and in 2010 enters Peepli Live seamlessly creating a continuum, where elements of his various lives are not perceptibly different from each other.

Godaan explores the two extremes of existence - one a harsh, debt-ridden village life, and the other is the luxurious life of wealth and comfort. Hori’s intense desire to get a cow for his godaan is met when he manages to buy a cow after taking a loan. A chain of events is set into motion when Hori’s brother Heera poisons the cow in a fit of rage and runs away. Hori borrows more money to bribe the police and pay penalties to the panchayat for the missing cow. Eventually Hori marries off his daughter for Rs 200 to save his ancestral land from being auctioned because of his inability to pay land tax. Hori dies trying to repay his debts, upper most being godaan.

Hori of Peepli Live is a man whose land has already been auctioned and he lives by digging and selling earth from a barren piece of land. The first time Hori appears in the film he is already knee deep in the pit that he is digging. By the time he dies the pit is deep enough to swallow a man. In the film Hori makes just three short appearances as opposed to the elaborate circus surrounding Natha. Natha who despite being caught in an impossible situation has an agency, which he employs to run away the moment a chance, present itself. For Hori, both in the book as well as the film, this option is not available.

In drawing parallels between Gajendra Singh’s situation and that of Natha’s in Peepli Live would also require an acknowledgment of Hori. And in that acknowledgment we will need to face the real and chronic crisis in rural India. Civil society can choose to outrage at individual cases of tragedy or can choose to reconsider its stand on safety nets for the poor, and economic policy which is not just about urban centres but takes stock of the overall situation in the country.